Many Americans believe that sex discrimination no longer presents
a significant problem for working women. Increasingly common are newspaper and other media accounts of women who receive high-level appointments
in academia and in the other professions, and who advance to upper-level corporate positions. The appointment in July 1999 of a woman as president and
chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, the world's second-largest computer
company, was greeted with the pronouncement that “the glass ceiling finally
had been shattered,” and that the appointment reflected the absence of barriers that blocked women from promotion to middle and senior management
positions.
1 But, the elevation of a woman to a CEO position clearly is not an
everyday occurrence. In fact, Hewlett-Packard was only the third of the Fortune 500 companies to turn to a woman for leadership at the highest level.
2
The glass ceiling may have been cracked in this instance, but to characterize
it as “shattered” is to engage in gross exaggeration.

Certainly, we should celebrate the appointment of a woman to a leadership
position in a company as large as Hewlett-Packard and in an industry historically dominated by men as a significant step toward workplace gender equality. But this appointment hardly means that women no longer confront barriers
in achieving equal workplace status with men. Although the past thirty-five
years have witnessed much progress, sex discrimination—blatant, subtle, and
covert—continues to plague working women. Nearly all still encounter obstacles to job advancement, whether the obstacles be glass or cement ceilings
or ordinary brick walls.

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